Produced by Dagny; John Bickers
THE STORY OF A CHILD
By Pierre Loti
Translated by Caroline F. Smith
PREFACE
There is to-day a widely spread new interest in child life, a desire to
get nearer to children and understand them. To be sure child study is
not new; every wise parent and every sympathetic teacher has ever been
a student of children; but there is now an effort to do more consciously
and systematically what has always been done in some way.
In the few years since this modern movement began much has been
accomplished, yet there is among many thoughtful people a strong
reaction from the hopes awakened by the enthusiastic heralding of the
newer aspects of psychology. It had been supposed that our science would
soon revolutionize education; indeed, taking the wish for the fact, we
began to talk about the new and the old education (both mythical) and
boast of our millennium. I would not underrate the real progress, the
expansion of educational activities, the enormous gains made in many
ways; but the millennium! The same old errors meet us in new forms, the
old problems are yet unsolved, the waste is so vast that we sometimes
feel thankful that we cannot do as much as we would, and that Nature
protects children from our worst mistakes.
What is the source of this disappointment? Is it not that education,
like all other aspects of life, can never be reduced to mere science? We
need science, it must be increasingly the basis of all life; but exact
science develops very slowly, and meantime we must live. Doubtless the
time will come when our study of mind will have advanced so far that we
can lay down certain great principles as tested laws, and thus clarify
many questions. Even then the solution of the problem will not be in the
enunciation of the theoretic principle, but will lie in its application
to practice; and that application must always depend upon instinct,
tact, appreciation, as well as upon the scientific law. Even the aid
that science can contribute is given slowly; meanwhile we must work with
these children and lift them to the largest life.
It is in relation to this practical work of education that our effort to
study children gets its human value. There are always two points of
view possible with reference to life. From the standpoint of nature
and science, individuals count for little. Nature can waste a thousand
acorns to raise one oak, hundreds of children may be sacrificed that
a truth may be seen. But from the ethical and human point of view the
meaning of all life is in each individual. That one child should be lost
is a kind of ruin to the universe.
It is this second point of view which every parent and every teacher
must take; and the great practical value of our new study of children
is that it brings us into personal relation with the child world, and so
aids in that subtle touch of life upon life which is the very heart of
education.
It is therefore that certain phases of the study of child life have
a high worth without giving definite scientific results. Peculiarly
significant among these is the study of the autobiographies of
childhood. The door to the great universe is always to the personal
world. Each of us appreciates child life through his own childhood,
and though the children with whom it is his blessed fortune to be
associated. If then it is possible for him to know intimately another
child through autobiography, one more window has been opened into the
child world--one more interpretative unit is given him through which to
read the lesson of the whole.
It is true, autobiographies written later in life cannot give us the
absolute truth of childhood. We see our early experiences through the
mists, golden or gray, of the years that lie between. It is poetry as
well as truth, as Goethe recognized in the title of his own self-study.
Nevertheless the individual who has lived the life can best bring us
into touch with it, and the very poetry is as true as the fact because
interpretative of the spirit.
It is peculiarly necessary that teachers harassed with the routine of
their work, and parents distracted with the multitude of details of
daily existence, should have such windows opened through which they may
look across the green meadows and into the sunlit gardens of childhood.
The result is not theories of child life but appreciation of children.
How one who has read understandingly Sonva Kovalevsky's story of her
girlhood could ever leave unanswered a child starving for love I cannot
see. Mills' account of his early life is worth more than many theories
in showing the deforming effect of an education that is formal
discipline without an awakening of the heart and soul. Goethe's great
study of his childhood and youth must give a new hold upon life to any
one who will appreciatively respond to it.
A better illustration of the subtle worth of such literature, in
developing appreciation of those inner deeps of child life that escape
definition and evaporate from the figures of the statistician, could
scarcely be found than Pierre Loti's “Story of a Child.” There is hardly
a fact in the book. It tells not what the child did or what was done to
him, but what he felt, thought, dreamed. A record of impressions through
the dim years of awakening, it reveals a peculiar and subtle type of
personality most necessary to understand. All that Loti is and has been
is gathered up and foreshadowed in the child. Exquisite sensitiveness
to impressions whether of body or soul, the egotism of a nature much
occupied with its own subjective feelings, a being atune in response to
the haunting melody of the sunset, and the vague mystery of the seas,
a subtle melancholy that comes from the predominance of feeling over
masculine power of action, leading one to drift like Francesca with the
winds of emotion, terrible or sweet, rather than to fix the tide of the
universe in the centre of the forceful deed--all these qualities are in
the dreams of the child as in the life of the man.
And the style?--dreamy, suggestive, melodious, flowing on and on with
its exquisite music, wakening sad reveries, and hinting of gray days of
wind and rain, when the gust around the house wails of broken hopes and
ideals so long-deferred as to be half forgotten,--the minor sob of his
music expresses the spirit of Loti as much as do the moods of the child
he describes.
Such a type, like all others, has its strength and its weakness. Such a
type, like all others, is implicitly in us all. Do we not know it--the
haunting hunger for the permanence of impressions that come and go,
which pulsates through the book till we can scarcely keep back the
tears; the brooding over the two sombre mysteries--Death and Life (and
which is the darker?); the sense of fate driving life on--the fate of
a temperament that restlessly longs for new impressions and intense
emotions, without the vigor of action that cuts the Gordian knot of
fancy and speculation with the swift sword-stroke of an heroic deed.
It is fortunate that the translator has caught the subtle charm of
Loti's style, so difficult to render in another speech, in an amazing
degree. This is peculiarly necessary here, for accuracy of translation
means giving the delicate changes of color and elusive chords of music
that voice the moods and impressions of which the book is made.
Let us read the revelation of this book not primarily to condemn or
praise, or even to estimate and define, but to appreciate. If it be true
that no one ever looked into the Kingdom of Heaven except through the
eyes of a little child, if it be true that the eyes of every unspoiled
child are such a window, take the vision and be thankful. If, perchance,
this window should open toward strange abysses that reach vaguely away,
or upon dark meadows that lie ghost-like in the mingled light, if out
of the abyss rises, undefined, the vast, dim shape of the mystery, and
wakens in us the haunting memories of dead yesterdays and forgotten
years, if we seem carried past the day into the gray vastness that is
beyond the sunset and before the dawn, let us recognize that the mystery
or mysteries, the annunciation of the Infinite is a little child.
EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS.
TO HER MAJESTY ELIZABETH, QUEEN OF ROUMANIA.
December, 188-
I am almost too old to undertake this book, for a sort of night is
falling about me; where shall I find the words vital and young enough
for the task?
To-morrow, at sea, I will commence it; at least I will endeavor to put
into it all that was best of myself at a time when as yet there was
nothing very bad.
So that romantic love may find no place in it, except in the illusory
form of a vision, I will end it at an early age.
And to the sovereign lady whose suggestion it was that I write it, I
offer it as a humble token of my respect and admiration.
PIERRE LOTI.
THE STORY OF A CHILD.
CHAPTER I.
It is with some degree of awe that I touch upon the enigma of my
impressions at the commencement of my life. I am almost doubtful whether
they had reality within my own experience, or whether they are not,
rather, recollections mysteriously transmitted--I feel an almost sacred
hesitation when I would fathom their depths.
I came forth from the darkness of unconsciousness very gradually, for my
mind was illumined only fitfully, but then by outbursts of splendor
that compelled and fascinated my infant gaze. When the light was
extinguished, I lapsed once more into the non-consciousness of the
new-born animal, of the tiny plant just germinating.
The history of my earliest years is that of a child much indulged
and petted to whom nothing of moment happened; and into whose narrow,
protected life no jarring came that was not foreseen, and the shock of
which was not deadened with solicitous care. In my manners I was always
very tractable and submissive. That I may not make my recital tedious,
I will note without continuity and without the proper transitions those
moments which are impressed upon my mind because of their strangeness,
those moments that are still so vividly remembered, although I have
forgotten many poignant sorrows, many lands, adventures, and places.
I was at that time like a fledgling swallow living high up in a niche in
the eaves, who from time to time peeps out over the top of its nest with
its little bright eyes. With the eyes of imagination it sees into the
deeps of space, although to the actual vision only a courtyard and
street are visible; and it sees into depths which it will presently need
to journey through. It was during such moments of clairvoyance that I
had a vision of the infinity of which before my present life I was a
part. Then, in spite of myself, my consciousness flagged, and for days
together I lived the tranquil, subconscious life of early childhood.
At first my mind, altogether unimpressed and undeveloped, may be
compared to a photographer's apparatus fitted with its sensitized glass.
Objects insufficiently lighted up make no impression upon the virgin
plates; but when a vivid splendor falls upon them, and when they
are encircled by disks of light, these once dim objects now engrave
themselves upon the glass. My first recollections are of bright summer
days and sparkling noon times,--or more truly, are recollections of the
light of wood fires burning with great ruddy flames.